The Chaos Agent by Mark Greaney

Published by Berkley on February 20, 2024

While Gray Man novels are about action, not deep thought, The Chaos Agent might be seen as a cautionary tale about the consequences of misusing Artificial Intelligence — specifically, by creating autonomous weapons that are guided by an AI. The concept of autonomous AI weaponry has been familiar to fans of science fiction novels and Terminator movies for decades, but The Chaos Agent offers a credible and timely look at how AI killing machines might threaten the world at a time when political leaders are asking whether it would be wise to regulate AI technology.

Granted, most of the concern about AI has involved pranksters creating deepfake videos and students using ChatGPT to write term papers. Autonomous weapons — machines that make their own decisions about when and how to engage in battles — could pose a greater existential threat than most other unfortunate uses of AI.

Court Gentry, aka Violator, aka the Gray Man, is traveling in South America with his dangerous lover Zoya Zakharova. They’re trying to stay under the radar of the many people who want to kill them. That plan is thwarted by a drone that happens to be watching a Russian who is watching Zoya. The Russian wants Zoya’s help to exfiltrate an agent in Mexico who has information about autonomous weapons. Zoya would like to help but Court wants none of it. He is nevertheless sucked into danger when the drone sends his picture to a bad guy who identifies him as a target.

More immediate targets are scientists and engineers who are being killed in countries around the world. Different intelligence agencies have different theories about how they are connected. Their connection to weaponized AI will be apparent to the reader, but why they need to be assassinated is less obvious.

One threat leads to another as Gentry is targeted by a former CIA assassin. After a series of action scenes, Gentry agrees to help the CIA get to the bottom of the murders and to thwart the risk of giving a tactical advantage to whichever nation is the first to develop autonomous weaponry. Machines that fight on their own initiative are faster and deadlier than humans operating weapons. As science fiction and thriller fans know, an AI that can train itself to adapt to changing battlefield conditions will eventually decide that the best tactic to assure its own survival is the eradication of all humanity. Gentry decides it might be wise to prevent that from happening.

One of the scientists who has been targeted is Anton Hinton. He has a lab in Cuba and a strong security team, but he strengthens the team by hiring Zack Hightower. Series fans will recognize Hightower as a former CIA paramilitary guy who once worked with, and later worked against, Gentry. Hightower and Gentry are fated to reunite in Cuba.

The plot is intelligent, although it is largely an excuse for action scenes. That isn’t a complaint. Shootouts, explosions, chases, crashing trucks through fences, all the good stuff that looks cool in movies is just as fun on paper, given Mark Greaney’s cinematic writing style. Greaney is one of the best action writers in the business.

Gray Man novels are a cut above most tough guy action novels because the plots are tight, intelligent, and surprisingly credible. And if a plot element might not be credible, Greaney makes the storyline seem plausible in the moment, even when Gentry is shooting at four-legged war machines that would be at home in a Star Wars movie. The Chaos Agent is an entertaining action story, but if it makes people think about the risks of using AI as a weapon, the novel will have served a higher purpose.

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Burner by Mark Greaney

Published by ‎ Berkley on February 21, 2023

A UN summit in New York will finalize an agreement between the West and Russia to restore Russia’s most favored nation status in exchange for Russia’s agreement to end its war with Ukraine. While Ukraine is not a party to the agreement and will likely fight on its own to regain its lost territory, the agreement does not require Russia to restore the land it seized. This is a bad deal for Ukraine, but the West wants Russian oil and gas. I can understand that premise, but when he plotted Burner, Mark Greaney probably didn’t know that western nations would get by just fine without Russian oil. Maybe the novel’s prediction will still come true, but those who hope for justice in Ukraine will be outraged if it does.

Court Gentry is certain that nobody in power cares about outrage against injustice. Power invites the kind of corruption that has always plagued Gentry, both during and after his tenure with the CIA. Gentry is still subject to a CIA kill order. His current CIA nemesis, Suzanne Brewer, pauses the longstanding order whenever she needs Gentry’s services. She sends a desk jockey, Angela Lacy, to meet with Gentry after tracking him to his boat in the Caribbean, where Gentry is fulfilling a contract from a wealthy Ukrainian to sink yachts owned by Russian oligarchs. Angela has no idea that man she’s meeting is the Gray Man.

A Russian who handles financial transactions for Russian spy agencies has copied those transactions to a phone. Having had his fill of Russian deviltry, the Russian gives the phone to the Swiss banker who processed those transactions. By matching the data in the phone to the bank records, a smart forensic accountant will be able to trace payment recipients in western nations who are taking bribes from Russians. It turns out that their numbers are plentiful. Naturally, those folk want to stop the banker before the records are made public.

The Swiss banker, Alex Velesky, is a Ukrainian who has no love for Russia. He sends the bank records to the cloud and plans to deliver the password and the phone to Ezra Altman, a forensic accountant employed by DOJ who has spent years building a database of suspicious Russian financial transactions.

Velesky must overcome several obstacles. First, Brewer has hired Gentry to recover the phone after telling Gentry that the phone includes evidence of CIA financial transaction in Russia that, if exposed, would place CIA operatives in danger and imperil national security. Second, Zoya Zakharova has been hired by a rival bank (or so she thinks) to recover the phone so that the bank can use the data to poach some of Russia’s banking business. Third, the Russians have tumbled to Velesky’s plan and have sent their best man to recover the phone.

Series fans will recall that Gentry and Zoya have a thing going on. They’ve both been deceived about the nature and purpose of their missions and, naturally enough, they will eventually stop fighting each other and start fighting together. The fighting includes the stuff from which thrillers are made — gun battles, knife fights, jumps between rooftops, even the overused crawl across the top of a train car while the train is in motion. Thankfully, there isn’t a ridiculous fistfight on top of the train, as Greaney avoids crossing the line that separates improbable realism and impossible movie stunts.

While Burner is fundamentally an action novel, Zoya’s alcoholism and substance abuse (and Gentry’s fears and frustration with Zoya’s addictions) add depth to the characters. Greaney sets up Lacy to play a courageous role despite Zoya’s skepticism that she has what it takes. He also sets up an ending that demands sacrifice in the name of principle — the kind of principles for which Russians and their corrupt counterparts in the US and Europe have no use. All of that makes Burner a saccharin-free “feel good” story, although a fair amount of indiscriminate death precedes the relatively happy outcome.

Greaney is one of the best action thriller writers in the business and, unlike too many novelists who write about tough guys, he doesn’t depend on divisive politics and gun worship to attract an audience. Series fans won’t be disappointed, while new readers can easily enjoy Burner without reading all the Gray Man novels that precede it.

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Sierra Six by Mark Greaney

Published by ‎ Berkley on February 15, 2022

Most Gray Man novels are pretty good. Some are really good. Sierra Six is on another level. It’s the best Gray Man novel I’ve read, in part because it humanizes Court Gentry. Or, at least, it proves that Gentry was once human.

Gentry’s life has changed over the course of the series. Once he was a CIA lone-wolf operative, essentially an assassin. Then he became part of a CIA paramilitary team. Then he was chased by the CIA and marked for assassination. He became a mercenary before he made an uneasy alliance with the CIA. He’s still a mercenary as Sierra Six opens and the fickle CIA wants him dead again.

The story follows two branches, one in the present, one twelve years in the past. In the present, Gentry has been hired through the dark web to plant microphones outside the Turkish embassy in Algeria. He assumes he’s been hired by the Indian government for a mission that India can deny if it goes haywire. The mission goes haywire after Gentry sees a man he thought had died twelve years earlier. Gentry ignores the mission for which he was hired in favor of his own mission: to kill the dead man.

Gentry’s revised mission goes haywire when the man he wants to kill, Murad Khan, eludes him and orchestrates the capture of his handler, a woman named Priya. Gentry adds freeing Priya to his to-do list, along with killing Khan. (Yes, there is a scene in which Gentry screams the name Khan. Yes, I immediately pictured William Shatner as Gentry. Yes, that makes me an aging nerd.)

To achieve his goal, Gentry needs to ask his former boss, Matt Hanley, for information. Hanley, a character who will be familiar to series readers, has been relegated to Palau as punishment for his friendship with Gentry. Another CIA character who will be familiar to readers, Suzanne Brewer, is now in charge of killing Gentry, but that ongoing storyline is only collateral to the main action.

Hanley’s information leads Gentry to a retired CIA station chief named Ted Appleton who is now living in Mumbai. Appleton is initially a character of ambiguous loyalty as Mark Greaney makes the reader guess whether he’s on Gentry’s side.

The story that takes place in the past explains Gentry’s animosity toward Khan. It also explains how Gentry transitioned from being a solitary assassin to a member of Sierra Golf, a CIA paramilitary team. That team and its leader, Zack Hightower, will be familiar to series fans from earlier books. The story explains Gentry’s training and early missions before Gentry tackles Khan’s plan to detonate dirty bombs at US military bases in Afghanistan.

Both stories are filled with action. The earlier story’s action culminates in a helicopter chases, which is a refreshing change from most thriller chase scenes. A helicopter piloted by Gentry chases down three other helicopters flying toward three different destinations while his paramilitary team tries to shoot them out of the sky before they can deliver their deadly cargo. Is that even possible? Probably not, but unlikely action scenes never stop me from enjoying James Bond movies.

The story set in the present culminates with Gentry trying to prevent Khan’s detonation of another dirty bomb, this one in Mumbai. Among other improbabilities, Gentry has to climb a crane and leap into a partially constructed building during a monsoon. We ask a lot from our action heroes, don’t we?

While working with Sierra Golf, Gentry finds himself attracted to a bright analyst in Afghanistan named Julie who, like Gentry, lacks social skills (she freely admits she’s somewhere on the spectrum). In the present, Gentry bonds a bit with Priya. Gentry’s intense desire to protect both women, and in particular his emotional response to Julie, gives Gentry the heart that makes it possible for empathic readers to connect with him. Unlike Hightower, who measures his morality by whether he kills more bad people than good people, Gentry (at least during his early days with Sierra Golf) has reservations about that moral equation.

Mark Greaney generally avoids overt political discussions, or at least he avoids having politics intrude on Gentry’s life apart from the scolding Gentry receives when he tries not to kill the innocent. Gentry is usually too busy avoiding death to give much thought to philosophical questions.

I appreciated the character development we see in Sierra Six and, of course, I enjoyed the nonstop action in the parallel stories. Action novel fans who haven’t read any of the Gray Man novels can easily read Sierra Six as a standalone. As an adrenaline rush, it’s one of the best high-octane stories I’ve read in recent memory.

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Relentless by Mark Greaney

Published by Berkley on February 16, 2021

Action thrillers with shootouts and fist fights and Middle Eastern terrorists usually range in quality from mediocre to bad. Mark Greaney’s novels are a happy exception. He’s produced ten Gray Man novels since 2009. The protagonist, Court Gentry, hasn’t changed much over the course of the series — apart from falling in love and stressing about feeling vulnerable because of it — but Gentry doesn’t really need to change. He’s an action hero. His job is to save the world and to entertain readers while he works. Thanks to Greaney’s ability to link action scenes together like cars on a runaway train, Relentless is another thrill ride.

Gentry starts the novel in a hospital bed, recovering from stab wounds and a nasty infection. That doesn’t stop the CIA’s DDO, Matt Hanley, from giving him a new assignment after being assured that Gentry might live for at least a week if he’s unplugged from his IV. Gentry is an off-the-books deniable asset, one of a few who are pressed into Hanley’s service when he doesn’t want an operation to leave American footprints. Another off-the-books asset, Zack Hightower, went to Venezuela to interrogate Clark Drummond, an NSA computer scientist who left his job, taking with him a database of every spy in the world and new facial recognition software that will tag the spies whenever they are captured by a camera. Unfortunately, Hightower was tagged by the software so it’s Gentry’s turn to track down Drummond.

A couple of gun battles later, the task is finished, but not before Gentry discovers that he’s not the only person looking for Drummond. An elite team of mercenaries working for an Israeli-owned company has been hired by the United Arab Emirates. They confront Gentry in Venezuela, not quite knowing why Gentry is there. They’re soon chasing Gentry around the globe as their mission expands.

Speaking of mercenaries, Gentry’s girlfriend, Zoya Zakharova, a former Russian spy and another of Hanley’s deniable assets, has infiltrated Shrike Group, a mysterious company that has recruited operatives from espionage agencies around the world. She begins working on a project that monitors Iranian activities in the EU. Zoya assumes that the client is Israel but Shrike doesn’t let its employees know anything about its clients. We eventually learn that any assumptions made about Shrike and its clients are likely to be false.

That setup all occurs early in the story. Greaney throws a lot of information at the reader before going turning the action up to 11. Gentry learns that Zoya has likely been outed to her former Russian masters so he goes to Berlin to watch her back. What seems to be an Iranian plot to attack the American embassy in Berlin sets the stage for a more sinister plot by someone who isn’t technically an American enemy. Gentry and Zoya team up, eventually bringing Hightower back into the story, and chapters are filled with flying bullets and exploding drones as our improbably unkillable heroes take on an army of terrorists and mercenaries.

I appreciate the fact that in most of these novels, Gentry is fairly apolitical. He goes after bad guys without demonizing them because of their nationality. He avoids killing innocent people because he doesn’t see humans as collateral who can morally be sacrificed as part of a risk assessment. He trades quips with Hightower and worries that Zoya, who appreciates fine art, is too good for him. In short, at least in recent books, there’s no reason not to like Gentry. That makes it easy for an action novel fan to like the Gray Man books, regardless of the reader’s politics.

Gentry’s career has gone through an evolution, from agent to outlaw who was unfairly hunted by his agency to independent contractor. The end of the novel changes his life again. It’s good to keep a series fresh and, so far, the Gray Man series shows no signs of growing stale.

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One Minute Out by Mark Greaney

Published by Berkley on February 18, 2020

You know what you’re getting when you read a Gray Man novel. An abundance of action, a fair amount of mayhem, and a story that blows past the boundaries of plausibility. You also know that characterization is rudimentary, with the exception of the protagonist, whose personality is well established. Court Gentry is an action hero, not an introspective character who cares about personal growth. He knows what he knows and that’s all he’ll ever know. He’s happy with that, so why should readers complain?

I don’t follow many unidimensional action heroes, but there are a few I find entertaining. The Gray Man series is on that list. Few action thriller writers actually deliver thrills. Mark Greaney is one of them. I don’t care that the action is implausible because the story moves so quickly that I don’t have time to think about it.

The Violator, a/k/a the Gray Man, a/k/a Gentry, is hired to kill a retired Serbian war criminal by people who think he deserves to be dead. Killing people is Gentry’s thing, and if he’s paid to do it, all the better. Of course, he only kills people who deserve it, and to some minds, that makes it okay. To my mind, fretting about Gentry’s morality— he doesn’t claim to have any — would get in the way of the story.

As he’s getting ready to take the shot, Gentry goes against his instincts and noses around because he senses something’s not right. When he investigates, he discovers a couple of dozen women and girls who are shackled to the floor. He learns that the women are being trafficked as sex slaves — a popular thriller theme in recent years — and that the women are likely to pay a price for the mayhem he is causing. Gentry doesn’t have the resources to rescue a dozen women from a hellhole, but after he kills the war criminal and makes his escape, he feels guilty about whatever grief he might have caused them.

Gentry eventually hooks up with a female EUROPOL analyst named Talyssa Corbu. She’s usually tracking down financial criminals, but she’s freelancing in an effort to take down the sex slave pipeline. She has a personal stake because she enlisted her sister to cozy up to one of the leaders of the Consortium that manages this billion-dollar enterprise, and her sister, not being trained as a spy, got herself kidnapped and added to the stable of sex slaves. Talyssa eventually uses her skills at following the money to help Gentry use his skills at killing bad guys.

To follow the kidnapped girls, Gentry chases after and boards a yacht, then tries to figure out how to infiltrate a heavily guarded way station for enslaved women in Italy. In the meantime, the CIA has an important mission for Gentry and needs him to come home. To that end, a team is sent to Italy to bring him home against his will.  All of this is just an excuse for chase scenes, gun battles, underwater chase scenes involving gun battles, and . . . you get the idea. By the time it’s all over, Gentry is in California and a lot of people are dead.

The highlight comes near the end when Gentry enlists some over-the-hill action heroes and a geriatric helicopter pilot to help him assault a rich man’s estate. The story isn’t even slightly plausible but it is richly entertaining. I wouldn’t rate One Minute Out as my favorite Gray Man novel, but it is much better than the bulk of action hero thrillers, the ones I typically abandon after twenty pages because the protagonists are so self-righteous and full of themselves. Yeah, Gentry knows he’s the baddest assassin out there, but he doesn’t make a big deal out of it. He is who he is, and Greaney’s emphasis isn’t so much on what a great patriot Gentry is (that’s an understated given) or how he’s a great American hero (debatable, even in Gentry’s mind), but on how much fun he can deliver to the reader by having Gentry break things and kill bad guys.

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